Donald Trump dumps Barack Obama’s ‘job-killing’ climate laws

Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping assault on Barack Obama’s climate-change legacy yesterday.

“My administration is putting an end to the war on coal”, said President Donald Trump.

Donald Trump declared an end to the war on coal as he unveiled a sweeping assault on Barack Obama’s climate-change legacy yesterday.

The US President signed several­ pro-fossil-fuel changes that place job creation ahead of laws restricting carbon emissions, which he described as “job killers”.

In doing so he unravelled much of his predecessor climate-change initiatives, including ordering a review­ of Mr Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan that restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

“That is what this is all about: bringing back our jobs, bringing back our dreams and making America wealthy again,” Mr Trump said as he signed the presidential decree flanked by coalminers.

“We will put our miners back to work ... My administration is putting an end to the war on coal. I am taking the historic step to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations.”

The changes announced yesterday will make it more difficult for the US to achieve its climate-change goals. But the Trump administration has not said whether it will withdraw from the inter­national Paris climate-change agreement as the President threatened during last year’s campaign.

Mr Trump, a climate-change sceptic, said his order would be “the start of a new era” in energy production and energy independ­ence for the US.

The order reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, which the White House hopes will slow the decline of the US coal industry­ and reduce job losses.

The executive order also reduc­es the relative importance of ­climate change and carbon emissions in policy decisions and reviews­ rules to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas prod­uction.

It removes some of the more strident climate-change language from the Obama era, including Mr Obama’s 2013 executive order that the government prepare for the impact of climate change and his order last year that outlines the “growing threat to national security” posed by climate change.

Former vice-president Al Gore said the order was “a misguided step away from a sustainable, carbon­-free future for ourselves and generations to come”.

“It is essential, not only to our planet, but also to our economic future, that the United States continues to serve as a global leader in solving the climate crisis by trans­itioning to clean energy,” he said.

But Mr Trump said Mr Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which requires states to collectively cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, was “a crushing attack­ on American investment” and an example of climate-change regulations that were “unnecessary” and “job-killing.”

He said his changes would promote fossil fuels and allow workers to “succeed on a level playing field for the first time in a long time”.

However, it is unlikely the changes could reverse the long-term decline of the US coal industry, which also has been weakened by competition from cheap natur­al gas and renewables.

The moves are the latest in a serie­s of decisions by the Trump administration that have angered environmentalists, including the approval to two major oil pipelines Mr Obama had blocked, known as Dakota Access and Keystone XL.

Mr Trump once called climate change a “hoax” but during the campaign he said he had an “open mind” on it.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said yesterday that Mr Trump “does not believe ... that there is a binary choice between job creation, economic growth and caring about the environment”.

The President denied his executive orders would threaten clean air and water.

“C’mon, fellas. You know what this is? You know what this says?” Mr Trump said to the coalminers at his signing ceremony at the Environmen­tal Protection Agency. “You’re going back to work.”